DARPA is Staging a UAV Crowd-Sourcing Contest

If you want to design your own microdrone and actually have it flown by the military, now's your chance. The Pentagon's new UAVForge Challenge is relying on crowd-sourcing to design a better drone. The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), together with Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, is running a competition that allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to come together in teams to design a small spy drone that can fly for at least two hours.

DARPA is Staging a UAV Crowd-Sourcing Contest

DARPA is Staging a UAV Crowd-Sourcing Contest

If you want to design your own microdrone and actually have it flown by the military, now's your chance. The Pentagon's new UAVForge Challenge is relying on crowd-sourcing to design a better drone. The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), together with Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, is running a competition that allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to come together in teams to design a small spy drone that can fly for at least two hours.

The Pentagon and its contractors are very good at building big—think of large UAVs that can spy or drop bombs from high altitude. Today, though, such drones are either too costly or too complicated to be used effectively by troops on the ground. That's where you come in. "Those are the areas where we think crowd-sourcing has the opportunity to exceed what we could do through other means," says Jim McCormick, a program manager at DARPA in charge of the competition.